Contemporary Latin American Cinema
* THIS COURSE IS TAUGHT IN BUENOS AIRES, ARGENTINA. *

The aim of the course is to offer an overview of recent Latin American Cinema. After the military dictatorships that devastated several countries during the 170´s and 1980´s, the return to democracy implied a revitalization of cinema within the region. Political, social, and cultural transformations were reflected by different renewal movements and by the emergence of young directors that contributed with original perspectives in order to understand new national contexts. On the one hand, new technologies had a deep impact in the creation of a new independent or alternative cinema (as the nuevo cine argentine , the cinema da retomada in Brasil and the joven cine chileno). On the other hand, the region´s always precarious movie industries have explored created ways of relating to the omnipresent American cinema. This heterogeneous and changing set of the latest Latin American productions have had great success in film festivals and international markets. This course will study Latin American films from a twofold perspective: as works of art and at the same time as testimonies of the social, cultural, and political transformations of the last decades of the 20th-Century and the first ones of the 21st. We will focus on the following topics: the relation between film and artistic avant-guards; high and popular culture; films as political devices and as witness of historical processes. (1 unit)

Filmography
Pizza, birra, faso (Adrián Caetano y Bruno Stagnaro, Argentina, 1997)
Nueve reinas (Fabián Bielinsky, Argentina, 2000)
La ciénaga (Lucrecia Martel, Argentina, 2001)
25 watts (Juan Pablo Rebella y Pablo Stoll, Uruguay, 2001)
Juego de escena (Jogo de cena, Eduardo Coutinho, Brasil, 2007)
El secreto de sus ojos (Juan José Campanella, Argentina, 2009)
Nostalgia de la luz (Patricio Gusmán, Chile, 2010)
De jueves a domingo (Dominga Sotomayor, Chile, 2012)
Sonidos vecinos (O som ao redor, Kleber Mendonça Filho, Brasil, 2012)
El abrazo de la serpiente (Ciro Guerra, Colombia, 2015)
Buey neón (Boi neon, Gabriel Mascaró, Brasil, 2015)
Culture